Across the country, every day, the petty tyrants of America's local gentry hire & fire people, promote or don't promote them, for arbitrary sexist & racist reasons. These ubiquitous miniature "cancellations" don't get any press or any notice. No one writes op-eds about them.
But cumulatively, especially over the course of decades, they add up to an amount of suffering & injustice that absolutely DWARFS any conceivable estimation of "white people getting fired for racism." They are the REAL cancel culture & they're so familiar as to be invisible.
What makes prominent white people getting called out for racism so salient -- what makes it jump out to us, to feel awkward & unusual & noteworthy -- is that it is, comparatively, *vanishingly rare*. It's anomalous & thus remarkable.
Lots of cancel-culture mongers will acknowledge this, or at least wave their hands at it, but it never gets anything but a "yes, but ..." or a "two wrongs don't make a right" or some other glib bullshit. It is extremely obvious that the ubiquitous racial & gender injustices ...
... in US culture don't *bother* them in the same way. They don't *feel* those or take them personally. It's their white peers facing new & unusual consequences that really gets under their skin, draws their attention, motivates their ire.
I don't know what to do about this -- how to make cancel bros appreciate, on a visceral level, the dozens & dozens of mini-cancellations that any woman or POC in America faces day after day, week after week, with no one to defend them on cable news.
The thing about structural racism & misogyny is that, in being structural, they become invisible (at least to those who don't suffer from them). It is efforts to push back on them that are always on trial, because those efforts are a crack in the structure, a change, a break.
I dunno how to wrap this up, or what to say to cancel bros other than, "imagine if you felt the same kinship & connection to the women & POC suffering every day that you feel for your fellow prominent white folks. REALLY try to imagine. Sit with it. What would follow?" </fin>
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
